Perlmutter, Riess, and Schmidt receive the 2011 physics Nobel for the discovery of the accelerating and expanding universe

Perlmutter is affiliated with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He led one of the two independent and rival teams that made the discovery. He receives half the prize. Schmidt, why is Australian and Riess, who is American share the other half. The citation is "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae". Their experimental proof that the universe's expansion is accelerating is an Earth-shattering discovery, which leads to the concept of the mysterious dark energy. Harnessing this new form of energy and using it for, say, distance space flights is only a matter of when, not if.